Dennis Oppenheim, Dennis Oppenheim Large Abstract Conceptual Sculpture Drawing for Ace Gallery LA, 1979

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Dennis Oppenheim (1938 - 2011)
Pencil and colored pencil drawing on paper,
'Memory Generator Receiver; Transmitter project for ACE Gallery … Read more Dennis Oppenheim (1938 - 2011)
Pencil and colored pencil drawing on paper,
'Memory Generator Receiver; Transmitter project for ACE Gallery Los Angeles'
(possibly with watercolor painting wash or pigment on paper)
Date: 1979
Signed: Hand signed
Dimensions: Framed Dimensions: 38.5 x 50.25 in

Dennis Oppenheim (1938 – 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer.
He attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, In 1964, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and an MFA from Stanford University in Palo Alto in 1965. In 1981 he married the sculptor Alice Aycock who remained a close friend. In 1998 he married Amy Plumb and they remained married.
His whose work encompassed sculptural installation, performance, and film. Oppenheim’s work, like the works of his peer Robert Smithson, sought to break sculpture out of traditional modes and pose questions rather than signify aesthetic allegiances. “Most of my work comes from ideas. I can usually do only a few versions of each idea. Land Art and Body Art were particularly strong concepts which allowed for a lot of permutations,” he once reflected. Oppenheim began experimenting with video art and performance during the 1970s, and made major contributions to the history of sculpture within public spaces throughout the remainder of his career. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Denver Museum of Art, the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Contemporary Art, Photography, Sculpture, Urban Art
Related Artists Vito Acconci, Richard Long, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Smithson. Oppenheim occupied a live-work loft in Tribeca from 1967 until his death.
Executed in New York, Paris and Amsterdam and documented in photography, the series Indentations, conceptual works, (1968) consisted of the removal of objects, exposing the impression of each object at that location. Viewing Stations (1967) were built as platforms for observing land vistas, suggesting an embodied notion of vision. The artist presents the base as the art itself, a viewer becomes an object to be looked at, a conceptual reversal.

Earthworks, Body – performance works, Genetic works, Film / video installations: Oppenheim began to produce installation art in the early seventies. These works were often autobiographical. In Recall (1974), a video monitor is an installation component, positioned in front of a pan of turpentine. The monitor shows a close up of Oppenheim's mouth as he verbalizes a stream-of-consciousness monologue induced by the smell, on his experiences in art school in the fifties.
Post-performance- biographical works:
In a series of eight works Oppenheim called "post-performance," the artist spoke through his surrogate performance figures about the end of the avant-garde, his own art-making, in dialogue as opposites or as in
Machineworks:
In the early eighties, room size sculptural installations took the form of factories and machines to visualize the genesis of an artwork before it becomes form. Final Stroke- Project for a Glass Factory (1981) analogized thinking patterns as moving parts. Vacuum cleaners and powered heaters activated raw material through sieves, troughs, stacks and vents, as the stages of processing in the production of ideas. The machines became projection structures for fireworks, producing thought lines in the air, as in Newton Discovering Gravity (1984).

Sculpture:
While he continues to use sound, light and motion in the sculptural work in the late eighties, the imagery includes ordinary objects in different scales or as a collision of objects. In several works, animals appear. A group of taxidermy deer produce flames from the tips of their antlers, in Digestion. Gypsum Gypsies. (1989).

Public Sculpture:
Oppenheim experimented with titled and cantilevered form in Device to Root Out Evil (1997). Included as part of the Venice Biennale, it uses hand blown Venetian glass on the country church's roof and steeple. In 1999, a version using translucent corrugated fiberglass was installed as a permanent work in Palma de Mallorca.
This was done for famed Los Angeles Gallery, Ace Gallery. owned by Doug Chrismas. In the 60s and early 70s he brought artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Donald Judd to Vancouver, Canada. The gallery expanded to Los Angeles in 1967 at the former Virginia Dwan Gallery space in Westwood, and then further expanded to New York in 1994. Doing exhibitions in conjunction with cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Cartier Foundation (Paris). In 1972, Chrismas mounted the Robert Irwin installation Room Angle Light Volume at the first ACE/Venice, which opened at 72 Market Street in 1971. In 1977, ACE mounted exhibitions of work by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert Motherwell, along with Michael Heizer See less